What vinyl platters could wake 20JFG prematurely from its cryogenic slumber in 2010? What repetitive beats could make its unconscious and partially thawed corpse shuffle towards the nearest dancefloor? What warm-hearted heaters could possibly defrost that heart of stone and illuminate that mind of disillusionment? What songs offered comfort when we were sat down and told that our plan to freeze ourselves in search of a better life in the future, had received some major setbacks? In the year that moved at 60 b.p.m, magic at higher tempos shone like the opening ceremony of the Ark of the Covenant.

Prodigious astral boogie 1st heard in the pastel discotheque of Count Ramulus III, Lord of the Vapour Folk (the DJ wouldn’t tell us what it was but we sneaked a look at the label while he was in the toilet).

Planet Mu gave the Europe a 4-part lesson in how they do things in Juke-Town. From Ramellzian voyages into unchartered arrangements by the younger generation, to telepathic hyperspeed bangers from the seasoned vets – each part served to further bend our stiff upper lips and get that booty shaking like it was Mecha-Godzilla being throttled by King Kong.

Gary Wallace (Anthony Michael Hall) and his best friend, Wyatt Donnelly (Ilan Mitchell-Smith), are 15-year-old nerds with low social standing at their Shermer, Illinois high school. During a weekend at Wyatt’s house in which his parents are out of town they came up with ‘Hunt With a Cat’, the finest mechanoid basement-acid act in the land.

Between two stratosphere piercing peaks lies a valley shrouded in a synthetic mist: atmospheric and portentous. Still, no amount of scene setting can quite prepare you for the majesty of those two peaks. “Last song of the night”-of-the-year.

Pitch bended celestial ballroom music so good, just hearing the opening takes us five years into the future whereupon we chance on a dank basement club, hear the first few chords of Ice Cream and levitate.

One of many awesome transmissions from Indonesia this year via Space Recs. Kusuma opening in a baroque fashion with a mile long procession towards a dark and foreboding tower…before storming it in thunderous style.

This is what it felt like to be the LHC in the moments leading up to the first collision.

OR

It has long been speculated that the observed periodic radial velocity pattern for the K giant Pollux might be explained in terms of an orbiting planetary companion. We have collected 80 high-resolution spectra for Pollux at Lick Observatory yielding precise radial velocities with a mean error of 3.8 m s<sup>-1</sup>, providing the most comprehensive and precise data set available for this star. Our data confirm the periodicity previously seen in the radial velocities. We derive a period of 589.7+/-3.5 days and, assuming a primary mass of 1.86 M<sub>solar</sub>, a minimum companion mass of 2.9+/-0.3M<sub>Jup</sub>, consistent with earlier determinations.

Bending polygons

Crystal Ark’s new 12’’, The Tangible Presence of the Miraculous, slid under the radar of 20jazzfunkgreats’ command and control room on August like an acid washed stealth bomber designed by Ibizan iluminados, on a terminal mission to destroy dancefloors from which, alas, we were absent this summer.

We are posting it today as a wake up call for all the DJs out there who haven’t yet grabbed a copy to do so, because every single unit sitting unwrapped in Juno’s magical vaults is an affront to the Goddess, and a step backwards in our ongoing transition towards hedonistic enlightenment.

In it we witness the next phase of Gavin Russom’s crusade against the tyranny of faceless, forgettable and tepid dance music. Having mapped a psychogeography of the darkest spots of the city that never sleeps in Crystal Ark’s previous 12, in the Tangible Presence of the Miraculous he speeds things up into a tribal vortex that we transverse in a relentless drug simulator, bombarded by kinaesthetic flashbacks of David Bowman’s trip beyond the infinite and Eddie Jessup’s genetic regression across percussive aeons, hypnotised by the animistic admonitions of trance Shaman Viva Ruiz, who you can literally hear levitating above the psychedelic fray which is this song.

Anyone who has gone to Berlin to find themselves this week could do a lot worse than finding themselves at this event, happening this very evening – Death Sentence: Panda!, Bronze, and War vs Sleep up in and visual hosting by the wondrous Andromeda kolletiv – it’s a 4 x win situation.

Ibiza, not Amnesia

Press rewind in the quantum mechanics cassette player and ascertain the lineage of that island in the midst of the Mediterranean which is Ibiza, before it became the destination for hordes of pumped drug tourists and women made of Bronze, before the baggy balearica posse spread across its golden beaches, and in a moment of lazy fever such as those which are known to prevail in places where the year is but another cycle in a neverending summer, and malaria not such a distant memory, weaved the tail-end of 70s progressiveness into the rising tide of dance hedonism.

What is it about this place which makes it such a vortex of fringe human emotions, the event horizon for communities straddling the neon thin line between oblivion and illumination?

Rewind further.

Rewind further into the times before the purifying wave of Christianity spilt the panoply of minor and major Gods from the altars of every house, even earlier, when those Gods still had no face but were nevertheless manifest, hovering between the pillars of light shining upon human and animal sacrifices within primitive circles of stone designed with a lore inherited from the priests of Crete, the cults of Cybele and the refugees from Atlantida.

These circles of stone, and the cyphers of old blood traced in the sand lie now hidden under stratum after stratum of geological detritus, layers of concrete and the weak buildings which the people of the future made. But their magick still lives, emanates from under the earth like invisible will o’ wisps with a musky scent which only the psychically attuned, perhaps also imbalanced, can feel, attracting them irresistibly like moths to the flame.

Dark forces and sidereal pathos, Gavin Russom has done it again, this time under the guise of Crystal Ark, it had to be DFA. The City Never Sleeps, how could it? It’s too busy pulsing to the analogue soul tempest that this sorcerer commands from the peak of an obsidian monolith.

Believe it or not, there is a moment when the last song is played and those who had sipped from the chalice until its bitter end are herded outside of the discotheque, to prepare and leap across the chasm which will take them back to the beginning of the spiral, so they can live the same night again.

Floors are scrubbed, and glasses washed, cash counted and bundled, the last of the living leaves locking the door behind him. A heartbeat, two heartbeats, the echo of music still seems to reverberate across the vast room, in the darkness. And then the lights come on, to project their morse code of light over floors still wet, and suddenly, the pulse, the ghost beat. Dance music shrouded in white, somewhat muffled in its transition past and back from River Styx, the pianos which would have made hands rise the air treble corrupted, which is befitting because it is corrupt hands that rise in the air to celebrate, it is the wraiths of dancers long gone whose silhouettes you can discern in the midst of the emerald fog blowing from the scented smoke projectors. When everyone else is gone, it is their time.

Uruguayan label International Feel have been releasing glorious slices of pure cosmic disco from some time now, their omission from this site is sinful to say the least. Rocha’s Hands of Love (Fingers of Sand) is their latest. Inside, you can find Gatto Fritto‘s version wrecking our spirits once again, this time with a pumping piece of haunted disco.